“Girls”: Can this friendship be saved?

From the time we’re little we’re told nothing is more precious than our female friends. We sign our letters BFF. We bond by sharing our most intimate secrets with each other, which is what endows us with the ninja-like skill and power to psychically disembowel each other.

I hate fighting with friends. I’m prone to fits of hysterical deaf, dumb and blindness at the first whiff of a dust up. The stakes are too high. I’d rather they run me down with their car then tell me I’m insensitive.

Which is why when I watched "Girls," and witnessed the blowout between Hannah and Marnie toward the end of the season (episode nine), I was seized by a mild terror. Not because I was so emotionally invested in this friendship, but because it was so true.

I shouldn’t have been surprised: While Dunham gives shout-outs to "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Sex and the City" in the first episode, it’s clear that "Girls" is a different beast altogether. Honestly, can you imagine Carrie and Samantha spooning in bed? Mary eating a cupcake in the tub while Rhoda sits on the edge in a towel shaving her legs? Yes, those girlfriends argued, but with five minutes left in the show they were weeping and apologizing over a gallon of Rocky Road or a round of Cosmos. Not so in "Girls." Then again, Rhoda never set up a doctor’s appointment for Mary to have an AIDS test, and Samantha never financially supported Carrie. So it should come as no surprise that when Marnie and Hannah do have a fight — a big BFF steel-cage death-match — it would get real.